WATERBURY >> The state Board of Pardons and Paroles - acting on what Chair Erika Tindill called "new and compelling information" - voted unanimously Monday morning to grant a clemency hearing for Bonnie Foreshaw.

The vote by Tindill and fellow board members Nicholas Sabetta and Robert Smith reverses a May 1 decision. The new information was a blistering five-page memo written by Superior Court Judge Jon Blue 24 years ago when he was a public defender.

In the memo, to then Chief of Legal Services Joette Katz, Judge Blue excoriated fellow public defender Dennis O'Toole for "disturbing" and "shocking malpractice" taking "a number of forms" in the Foreshaw case.

The new information was revealed May 28 in The Cool Justice column published by The Register Citizen and other Journal Register Co. Connecticut Group publications.

"We had heard the application already without this information," Tindill told The Register Citizen after the meeting. "What we did today was to grant a hearing for clemency based on the new information."

She said the clemency hearing could be placed on the docket for Nov. 13.

Foreshaw owned a home in Bloomfield in 1986, supported three children and was working as a machinist and a shop steward at a factory in Hartford. She had survived three violently abusive marriages and carried a gun for protection.

Now 65, Foreshaw has served more than 27 years for what many legal experts - including Blue - believe should have been a manslaughter charge. Had she faced a manslaughter prosecution, Foreshaw would have been free years ago. Instead, Foreshaw faced a charge of first degree murder for shooting at a man she had just encountered and who was harassing her and threatening to [f--] her up on March 27, 1986. At the last moment, the man admitted he pulled a pregnant woman in front of him as a human shield. A fatal shot entered the upper left chest and traveled toward the lung of Joyce Amos, who had been trying to restrain Hector Freeman.

Foreshaw wrote of her remorse in a volume of redemptive memoirs, "Couldn't Keep It To Myself," edited by the novelist Wally Lamb and featured on 60 Minutes: "I never lost sight of the fact that I still had my life and Joyce Amos, the lady who tried to help me that night, had lost hers. She had been someone's mother and someone's daughter, same as me. A powerful sadness was closing in. I began to ask myself how I could survive - or if I even wanted to ... ."

In the memo to Katz - now commissioner of the state Department of Children and Families (DCF) and a former state Supreme Court Justice - Blue said, "The two most flagrant aspects of his [the fellow public defender's] representation were a failure to challenge a highly questionable confession and a failure to present an effective mental state defense."

"Everything that happened to Bonnie Foreshaw has been one mistake and missed opportunity after another," Tindill said during Monday's meeting. "What an unlucky woman Bonnie Foreshaw has been, really."

Foreshaw, a battered and abused woman, gave birth to her first child after being raped at age 12. The abuse has continued throughout her life.

"A great deal of [this] relevant material was never produced [at trial] at all," Blue wrote. "No friends or family who knew Mrs. Foreshaw testified. A former husband had beaten Foreshaw on the head with a baseball bat ... and she had spent two weeks in the hospital. No hospital records were produced. Foreshaw had three failed marriages ending in domestic violence and divorce. No divorce or police records were produced. After she got out of the hospital, she had 'head problems' and went to see a neurologist. No neurologist was produced. The neurologist referred her to two different psychiatrists, who saw her a number of times. Neither of these psychiatrists was produced ... . The end result was that the jury learned little or nothing about Ms. Foreshaw and what was really happening in her mind. She did not have an effective defense."

Foreshaw's legal team includes attorneys Richard Emmanuel and Mary Werblin and the state's current chief public defender, Susan Storey. She is seeking a sentence reduction from 45 years to 40 years.